A practical intelligence amplification hack that really works: how to use your phone's TTS engine to give your brain a boost

Today I decided it was time I shared a unique, literally mind bending experience I've been having. If I could only get one idea out into the wider world this would be it. It's the best piece of technology advice I have to give.

Try it and it could change your life. Tell your friends and we might change the world. It's changed mine more than any other technological innovation since I got my first modem back in 1993 and discovered the Internet a year later.

As a lifelong fan of the human race I preferred the IA route and dreamed of a day when we would have William Gibsonesque brain machine interfaces (e.g., ala Count Zero) that would augment our brains, make us smarter and let us gobble up all the knowledge we wanted at superhuman speed.

Well, it turns out you can use speech synthesis technology (AKA TTS or Text-to-Speech) to hack the equivalent of a USB port for your brain, right now. No neurosurgery required!

Hacking your brain in 3 unintuitive steps

It's a new twist on an old idea: in the 17th century an erudite Catholic bishop and French Academy member named Pierre Daniel Huet had a servant follow him around with a book to read aloud to him during meals and breaks and thus avoid lost time.

Swap out the servant for a smartphone that uses text-to-speech technology to whisper in your ear at superhuman speed, plus a brain that has been specially trained to make sense of it.

You do this in 3 steps:

Setup your phone to read ebooks out loud to you, using a good text to speech engine.

If you have an Android phone I recommend installing the Ivona text to speech engine with the Amy UK voice and setting that up to work with Moon+ Reader Pro, which has the best text to speech support of any of the apps I've tried.

Make a habit of having your phone read out loud to you while you are going through your daily routines.

I personally use text-to-speech to read when I commute, work out, clean up, do the laundry, cook my meals, and before I go to sleep (a great cure for insomnia).

It takes a bit of getting used to, but once you do, automatic thoughtless routines don't seem to interfere with the reading experience. It's like a movie is playing in your head while your body is on auto-pilot.

I started with wired headphones and then upgraded to a couple of wireless bluetooth devices which are much more practical at the gym, where I now do most of my reading.

Gradually ramp up the speech rate

You should be semi comfortable starting out at speed 10 on the Moon+ Reader range. Don't give up if you find your thoughts wander and lose track. That seems to happen to everyone at first. Stick with it. It gets easier.

Assuming you read regularly for a few hours each week you will notice you can very gradually increase the reading speed every couple of weeks or so. Expect a bit of discomfort. Stretching out of your comfort zone is supposed to be uncomfortable. The reading experience suffers at first but you may enjoy the extra stimulation. You do lose track more often and may need to go back and reread a few pages. If that happens too often, try and slow down a bit. You want to stay on the edge. Keep it up though and you will find your brain adapts. It's literally growing.

Deep in the language centers of your brain, neurons are sending axons out of their dendrites to form new connections, while glial cells improve the bandwidth of existing connections by insulating them with myelin sheathing. It's a miracle:

The more you read the faster you can ramp up the speed. This is training. It's kind of like lifting weights. There's a minimum amount of time you need to work out to maintain your current strength, and a bit beyond that you gradually improve. I imagine eventually there must be a wall of diminishing returns you slam into. But judging by how fast the blind crank up their text-to-spech interfaces, I don't think we're so close to it. I ran into the maximum speech rate supported by my phone within a few months. I hardly ever slow down anymore.

Again, you'll have a hard time believing this when you start, but stick with it and you will eventually be listening comfortably at the fastest rate your phone supports, which is currently 50 on the Moon+ Reader speech rate scale. I've checked and that's faster than I can read with my eyes without cheating. I get through a typical book in about 4-5 hours with excellent comprehension.

People with an untrained ear will have a hard time believing you can actually make sense of all that chirping and buzzing because to them it will sound like the human equivalent of a fax transmission. But do this for long enough and you will find yourself double checking that you really are reading at the maximum possible speed because it just sounds so much clearer and more understandable than when you started out.

If you're like me, you might eventually find yourself unsatisfied with the maximum reading speed. You start wishing you could ramp it up even higher. Just to see if you can hack your brain to handle it. There has to be an upper limit right? But what is it?

In my case, this led to many hours of fruitless googling trying to look up relevant research or even corroborating anecdotal reports. Nothing. I reached out to Seany, the Moon+ Reader developer to try and convince him to support faster rates but he said he couldn't make it go any faster because none of the Android text-to-speech engines he's tried support it. Higher speech rate values are just ignored. I'd like this to change, but it probably won't if I'm the only person that cares about this. Which is part of the reason for this blog post.

I bet once enough people realize what they're missing there will be a demand for making this go as fast as the human brain can be hacked to handle. Then we get to find out how fast that is. In a couple of decades or so we might have genuine neural interfaces, the kind that can teach us how to fly a helicopter or fight like a kung fu master. In the mean time that only exists in our cyber punk fantasies and this is the best we got. It's not a bad start.

So, to summarize follow these three steps and and about a year or so later you have the closest equivalent to a USB port into your brain that present day technology has to offer. They won't even need to open up your skull to install it. We just repurpose the human brain's legacy audio port and ramp up its bandwidth.

The art of bluetooth

Updated 2016-9-4: I alternate between using:

An earpiece in quiet environments, when I'm on the go or when I need to keep an ear open.

Mpow: I started using this brand of bluetooth devices after someone in the comments section recommended them. They come in various flavours and sizes, but all have built-in media controls and similar firmware, which wasn't true for others brands I've tried. They're also inexpensive enough to throw out unceremoniously once I inevitably run out the embedded battery.

LG tone: My main complaint with the MPOW devices is that they don't offer the best audio recording so I sometimes need to switch to yet another bluetooth headset (an LG tone) if I'm making calls. If I had to go with just one bluetooth headset I'd compromise on the LG tone, which does it all, at the price of being cumbersome and a bit weird looking. Like my head has an antenna. Which I suppose it does.

Beware of the unintended consequences - there are side effects!

Beyond catching up on your reading and turning into an unsufferable know it all. Which was my initial motivation and a good one at that. I track the books I read with a custom field in Calibre, which is where I keep my book collection. According to my records I've read exactly 297 books this way since I started:

I'm not just reading more. I'm reading differently. For example, I now reread important books regularly to keep them fresh in mind and reinforce their influence. I find myself popping books like other people pop pills. There are books that help get me motivated, or work on my habits, or improve my judgement, or just chill out and take it all in stride. At least for a while. Also like a pill, the effect gradually wears off and you need another dose. Before I would almost never read a book twice. I barely had time to read it once. Now I can reread any book I like in two gym workouts, training my body and brain at the same time.

Getting back to the unexpected side effects, gradually ramping up the reading speed I'm comfortable with seems to have dramatically supercharged my brain's language centers. I'm not just reading more. I'm also writing faster and better. My communication and social skills have improved. I have more mental stamina. The intelligence amplification effect crosses boundaries.

The unexpected side effects

Better, faster, stronger writing skills

My theory for why doing this improves writing skills is that in order to understand speech you need a predictive model of what words are coming next. Each word primes a network of associations for the next word. So after Toy, you're much more likely to pick up Story than Gory, even if the sound is the same.

It works in both directions. The brain is efficient so it uses the same machinery to create new language structures that it does to understand language. Consequently, the boost to the mental machinery you get from training your mind to read quickly translates into improved writing skills as well.

Super cocktail party powers

Your brain has a special filtering system that allows you to tune out noise, and tune in your attention on a single voice. It's called the cocktail party effect.

I can do that better now. I have better comprehension of speech in noisier environments and I've verified this by testing my ability to understand synthesized speech in a variety of noise environments. I used to have to concentrate to understand my Kindle at the fast speech rate. If it was even slightly noisy I couldn't really do it without earphones. Noise like me crunching down on a salad. Or water pouring from the faucet. Even when it was quiet, the Kindle had to be close to me physically otherwise it was difficult to pick up what it was saying.

Training my brain to understand speech at faster rates than the Kindle supports has changed that. I can now understand the Kindle at the fastest speed without earphones from across the room while I go about my chores. Usually preparing breakfast and listening to my subscription of PhysOrg, my main source of news.

Boost to general intelligence

Language and thought are deeply intertwined. We think in the language we speak. We know there's a strong correlation between language aptitude and other types of non-verbal intelligence (e.g., musical talent). It's not necessarily a causal relationship but there is an influence.

Based on my personal experience I strongly suspect that using this training technique not only boosts verbal intelligence, but also spills over into enhanced general intelligence. I feel like a smarter, faster, more quick witted version of my former self.

I haven't gone as far as to try and test this rigorously so this is just based on my subjective experience. I might be fooling myself, or the perceived boost could be coming from something else entirely. I'm hoping someone does eventually test this carefully and I get to find out whether my hunch was right.

Why does this even work?

Training your brain with a text-to-speech engine creates a tight feedback loop that immediately rewards focus and comprehension while punishing failure much more than with visual reading. You can't dart your eyes back and reread that last sentence. You need to hang on. The relentless pace and control you can only get with synthetic speech are critical. Theoretically if everybody in your life started speaking slightly faster than you were comfortable and gradually ramped it up as you adjusted you would experience the same effect. But that's not an option.

So while at some level you're just listening to speech the seemingly undramatic quantitative difference eventually aggregates into a dramatic qualitative difference. Like the qualitative difference between casually going about your day and working out. You activate the same muscle groups but only the intensity, regularity and escalating challenge of a good training routine will change your body. Or your mind.

Calling all neuroscientists: fire up your MRIs!

I looked for objective research to back up my subjective experience but I couldn't find any so I don't think the kind of self-experimentation I've been putting myself through has been well studied yet.

I'm pretty confident there's nothing special about my particular brain and that anyone that goes through a similar process will achieve similar results.

Hopefully some of them will eventually be doing that under the watchful eyes of neuroscientists who can measure and quantify the effect. If I'm right and there is a practical, cheap, widely accessible brain training technique that can be proven to dramatically boosts a person's input/ouput bandwidth, verbal intelligence and possibly even general intelligence that could be a very big deal.

It started, ironically, with the last Kindle to support Text to Speech

I first realized heavy use of text-to-speech technology was having an interesting effect on my brain a few months into my first Kindle experience. This was 4 years ago and it was on a Kindle Keyboard device, now discontinued, which was ironically the last of Amazon's dedicated eInk readers to support speech synthesis. I initially preferred using the TTS over visual reading to avoid eye strain and to allow me to make better use of my time by reading while simultaneously doing other things.

The Kindle Keyboard only has 3 reading speeds. Slow, normal and fast. I tried reading at the fast speed but that was too hard. I had to back down to normal speed. At first, even that was a stretch, especially if I was trying to do anything else at the same time. But a couple of months later normal speed was easy and I started listening at the uncomfortable fast speed more and more often. A few months after that, I noticed the fast speed was no longer a challenge Now when I switched back to normal speed it seemed stupidly slow. Like the Kindle was mocking me.

At about the same time I also started noticing the first boost to my writing skills. I was reading a lot of 19th century literature and my writing actually became a bit more Victorian for a while. Thankfully, that mostly wore off as soon as I transitioned back to more modern literature. My social skills also seemed to improve at the same time.

I was so delighted by the experience and simultaneously horrified that Amazon had discontinued TTS from newer Kindle models that I started stocking up on Kindle Keyboards. Just in case. I have about 6 of them now. You'd think it would be in everybody's interest if people could read faster. I spend more on literature now than I do on any other form of media.

About a year into the experience it started bugging me that the Kindle's speech rate couldn't be made to go any faster. I started looking into hacking my Kindle which didn't lead to much beyond a root shell. I complained about this to Alon, who eventually helped me discover that I could do what I wanted on my Android phone, which is how I do most of my reading nowadays. It's also more convenient because I can use a device I already carry around that supports wireless audio. You should have seen me a few years ago trying to listen to the Kindle on a treadmill. Comical.

Patient zero: calling all early adopters!

Unfortunately, as far as Google goes I seem to be having a unique experience. I can't find any research papers, blog posts or forum discussions to back me up.

More worryingly, as far as I can tell I seem to be the only one that is super excited about this, aside from a handful of friends I've convinced to try this. I speculate that most of the non-visually impaired people who use text to speech use it as a poor man's audio book. They don't try to push the technology or themselves to the limits. They just take the path of least resistance and stick to whatever speed they're initially comfortable with. Maybe it takes a hacker's mindset to endure the initial discomfort and cognitive strain. I get it. Straying from the well beaten path usually doesn't lead anywhere. I hope I've convinced you that this time it does. Try it and see for yourself.

I don't know if this will ever catch on. I'm hoping it does bcause I believe it would have a hugely positive impact on society, even if only a small minority adopt it at first. The early adopters of new technologies are often already the most influential people in society, and getting them on board would pave the way for this to catch on in a big way. If I'm right and anyone can do this, imagine what would happen if everybody did. I don't think I'm the right person to make this go viral, but I'm hoping someone out there reading this is.

We're heading towards 2 billion smartphone users next year. That's a sizeable fraction of the world's population. They could all be doing this if they only knew the way. We should want them to. We need to encourage people to read and write more. There's no market for depth in any other form of mass media. Literature is the last refuge from the plague of superficiality and clickbait jamming our collective consciousness.

We don't need to invent anything new to have a more educated populace, less reality television, shallow news reporting and divisive politics that pander to the fearful and uneducated. We just need to make better use of what we already have. We can start with baby steps. Big things have small beginnings.

There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.
- Socrates

Comments

As you well know I have been using Moon+ Reader Pro (with Amy UK - I agree the most pleasant TTS voice I have come across) for a little while now. But this ramping up the speed thing is news to me!

As for the attention wandering point, I can certainly vouch for that. I thought initially that reading via TTS wasn't for me as I found that my mind wandered off and I had to go back and reread. I suspect that my habit of often having discussion heavy radio going in the background (which I mentally tune in and out of) was a factor as well. Alon suggested that I try reading along with the TTS which was a great suggestion and helped heaps. I have still often found that on the exercise bike and rowing machine at the gym are the places where it works best for me, but I sometimes come home from the gym feeling excited about the info I have gleamed while at the gym, and plug my phone into the aux input of my radio while I shower and have breakfast... A bluetooth headset sounds like a great idea (one I'll need to invest in...)

Back to the idea of ramping up the speed, it makes perfect sense but it never occurred to me (and you guys neglected to mention it previously!). Alon did ask in passing what speed I was using (as I think he thought it was taking me a long time to get through books... - which it has been). I'll need to start doing that now that I can finally maintain my attention enough to not need to reread sections!

As you can probably tell I think using text-to-speech this way is the best thing since sliced bread. No scratch that, better!

I was sure we mentioned the ramping up the speed bit, but if not better late than never! This post has been trying to claw out of my brain for quite some time now. I don't think I properly explained the experience I've had over the last 4 years even to myself. Now it's way past my bed time. Couldn't peel myself off the computer until I finished.

But either way, I didn't get it (perhaps I ignored it as I was struggling just to pay attention in the early stages). Regardless I amped up the speed this morning and listened to a bit and it worked well. I think I'll sit where I am for a little bit then in a week or 2 ramp it up again! :)

Hi Liraz, I know this is an old post but it helped me read a lot more in the last few months! Thanks! First, I am not a native speaker so forgive me for any typo/bad grammar. I would like to know what you think about this article: "I Was Wrong About Speed Reading: Here are the Facts" (I can't link to it without triggering the spam filter).

It's about speed reading which is not what you're doing here but I'll explain why I'm mentioning it. A few posters in the comment said they were able to read up to 700 WPM using Voice Dream Reader (which, by the way, I was disappointed to find out it only goes up to 300 on Android). While I imagine it is possible to read at such speeds and comprehend what you're reading, based on that article it appears that over 400 WPM (or, at max, about 500/600 WPM), working memory overload becomes an issue, since our brain can't handle that much information at that rate. I have been using many different RSVP apps and I found this to be true (I can read anywhere between 400 and 550 WPM based on the material), even with Tiny Reader, an app which supports both tts AND rsvp (maybe it's because I'm not a native speaker, or because I have a terrible attention span, or both, but I can't really follow a TTS voice alone even at moderate speeds). Apparently many people have this problem with audiobooks as well, where if they ramp up the speed too much they can't follow even if they understand the words. This would mean that with Moon+ Reader Pro getting up to 550 WPM (based on one of your comments), it pretty much reaches already the limit of the human brain, unless we'll find some actual intelligence amplification hack (maybe we can download more RAM to our brains? :p )

Somewhat relatedly, you can also use your javascript console to increase the playback speed beyond 2x for youtube videos. This can be very useful for watching slow lectures or screencasts. E.g. for 3x speed:

Thanks Sam. There's a 2.5 hour long debate I have queued up to watch.
I'll try your trick. I wonder if anyone has created a Greasemonkey
script that tweaks that Youtube interface to add that in there so you
don't have to drop to the console. If not, could be a neat idea.

Have you ever experimented any with different re-read speed trajectories?

I think re-reading is a WAY bigger deal than volume reading, and I teach my kids to re-listen/re-watch content at different speeds:

faster to develop big picture/contextual perspective

normal speed to solidfy the relationships in the material

Slower to stumble upon insights

I hadn't really encountered others doing both fast playback and re-reading until now, and I'm curious if you've experimented with using different playback speeds for 1st, 2nd and 3rd readings, especially testing the impact of going from slow to fast vs fast to slow, etc?

If I don't practice for long enough, the speed at which I'm comfortable reading goes down significantly and I need to retrain. This is when I've found rereading to be most useful. I find I can reread comfortable at a significantly faster rate than when I'm reading a text for the first time and that the new speed then carries over to other texts.

I also find tend to reread books now more frequently in general. Sometimes if I like a book enough I'll reread it immediately. I did that with "the first fifteen lives of harry august" and enjoyed the book almost as much in the second reading as on the first. Usually though, I'll reread after a while has passed from the first reading. I find the experience of reading a book has almost as much to do with the perspective of the reader as the content of a book. If your perspective changes, the experience changes.

I also want to say that I share your excitement about this. I have been using text to speech for some time to optimize the number of articles I can read during the day when I am not in front of a screen. There is a point where you become saturated with information, but like anything the more you listen the higher your tolerance!

I was previously using eSpeak, which is open source, but now I use Ivona on my android as it sounds so pleasant. I am currently also experimenting with Festival and the various language packs available.

Lastly, I should mention that I have a subscription to Audible (owned by Amazon), which I think is fantastic. It has an excellent selection of audiobooks and has a good android app that supports increasing the playback speed.

Also, I just saw your YouTube video. I didn't realize you could do that
just with free software running on your phone. Pretty neat. If I could
just turn the pages automatically I could use this to read dead tree
books. There are a few on my reading list I haven't managed to get to
that don't have ebook versions.

Regarding Audible, I think I'll give it another try soon. I didn't
realize you could adjust the speech rate and I'm wondering how fast you
can make it go. I don't mind paying for ebooks but I don't really like
the idea of having to buy a book twice or chose between the visual and
audio format. I'm waiting for that business model to die off, which
might have happened sooner had Amazon not bought Audible and improved
text to speech in the Kindles instead of removing it.

Oh, and Amazon now owns Ivona. I'm hoping they didn't buy it to kill it
off and protect their Audible investment because the new voices are
really fantastic. I wish we had a high quality FLOSS version of this.
All of the open source voices I've tried kind of sucked in comparison.

Amazon is big enough so that it doesn't get pushed around easily by
anyone, including the publishing industry. Last I heard they were in a
world war with the Hatchette book group over some other issues.

Also, the publishing industry didn't force them to remove TTS from the
eInk Kindles. That was their decision. They also didn't provide TTS
support on the first Kindle Fires, but then they brought it back with
the Kindle Fire HDX.

What the publishing industry demanded was the right to disable TTS on
books so that they could double dip and force people to pay multiple
times for the same content. Kind of like the real reason the RIAA tried
to outlaw software that performed backups of music CDs way back. In the
end the publishers did get the ability to turn off TTS though to be
frank I don't think they were within their legal rights to prevent
people from using whatever method they wanted to read the books they
own, but I'm guessing it's within their rights to try.

These days if I buy a book on the Kindle at it doesn't support TTS I
return it in protest, even though it isn't too hard to get around that
by removing the DRM.

Thanks for the blog post. It got me motivated to pull out my old android phone and figure out how to get all this up and running.

In Moon+ Reader Pro's "Control Options" I set the "Headset Play Key" to "Speak (Text-to-speech)" so now I can use the center button on my iPhone headphones to start/stop Ivona TTS which is very cool. I wonder if you can do the same with your bluetooth in-ear earphone.

P.S. I had no idea there were so many things the iPhone headphones could do but of course most only work with an iPhone.

It's nice that button in the middle of the iPhone headphones works with
Android. I think it triggers a generic play/pause media control function
rather than being specific to Moon+ reader.

FWIW I don't have pause and play on my Plantronics in-ear earphone which
does absolutely suck. I've looked everywhere for an in-ear bluetooth
earphone with a pause/play media control function and haven't managed to
find anything. I'd buy it in a heartbeat. Not sure why they don't make them.

Alon went as far as to buy a Pebble smartwatch just so he could
pause/play his Bluetooth earphone without having to take out his phone.
I'm waiting for the Moto 360 and that's my killer app for it too. Kind
of silly. I'm also considering the Nod Bluetooth ring for that when it
comes out and gets reviewed.

Also, as an alternative I've tried various bluetooth clips linked up to
wired headphones. To be honest the Apple earbuds are the best headphones
I've ever tried so with my clip-on bluetooth receiver I use that but if
I'm already willing to put up with a more cumbersome setup than my
earphone then the LG+ tone works better and is more comfortable than
using wired headphones + clip-on.

The visual system is far faster, at least in men, than the auditory system. I can speed-read an 80 page legal contract in about 15 minutes. Why is it faster? Because, as you have found with the TTS readers, you can only speed up reading all the words in a book so much. But what if you could selectively drop most of the common words in a text passage like: and, or, but, the, etc.

Or, for the younger generation, you would have text messaging... U wud hav txt msgN (courtesy of http://transl8it.com/ ).

Don't get me wrong, I applaud the initiative and thoroughly enjoyed the intellectual joyride of this post. A fine intelligent discourse is like a fine wine (not whine of course!). But like all fine wines moderation is the key.

I speed read documents that are routine, I slow read documents that I want to enjoy, I speed-read then slow-read documents I want to retain and I don't listen to audio books at all.

Does your TTS technique work? Probably. But at what cost.

Exercise is about clearing the mind and reducing stress. My stress level went up just reading about the Turbo TTS education express :-)

Hi Tim. I figured someone would bring up speed reading as a comparison.
In theory it's similar but in practice there are a few important
differences.

It's easier to cheat when you try to speed read by just skipping
stuff.

Because it's easier to read faster by skipping rather than by
actually speeding up your cognition, that's what your brain gets good
at. Skipping the "less important" parts.

Which isn't to say that you absolutely couldn't do this through the
visual system. I imagine there might be a training method out there
that if you follow diligently enough will produce similar effects. I
think it would need a similar quality in which the computer controls
the pace rather than you do. A line of scrolling text.

Even if such a visual training method existed, you wouldn't be able
to train while doing other things so in practice you would get a lot
less training. I don't have time to read paper books.

The speed of the visual system is somewhat neutralized by the
complexity of visual input.

Regarding multi-tasking vs multi-switching. It depends what the tasks
are. Automatic, effortless routines are handled by a different part of
the brain called the basal ganglia. That's why they feel effortless.
Because the part of your brain that feels effort isn't active.
Decisions, attention and higher order cognition are handled by the
prefrontal cortex. They are effortful.

So it's true that multitasking between different tasks that require
higher order cognition is actually multi-switching. But you brain does a
tremendous amount of true multi-tasking behind the scenes. It's a giant
parallel machine. Only the parts of it involved in attention function
serially. So you can walk and breathe at the same time while controlling
your heart rate and speaking with a friend on the phone. What you can't
truly multi-task is a task that requires attention or decision making.

You can drive safely while listening passively to a talk show on the
radio. Talking to someone on the phone (or in the backseat) because that
requires more higher order cognition. If road conditions become
difficult complete silence is better because not all of driving is
handled by your basal ganglia.

I track how long it takes me to do everything and I've measured this
effect prominently in my own life. I can safely speed-listen while doing
automatic routines and they don't take up any more of my time. But doing
anything that isn't routine often takes much slower, and I make more
mistakes, and enjoy the book less, which is one of the reasons I like
having media controls on my bluetooth reader.

"What you can't truly multi-task is a task that requires attention or decision making." UNLESS the tasks are running in parallel over the same material. The brain is specifically developed to multi-task whenever it can directly relate the effortful, real-time decision making to the immediate context of even a very high volume of ambient sensory input.

It may be something you really only do with your absolute highest interest-level content, but brain research consistently shows that both retention and practical application of knowledge are improved with multisensory learning.

So why not listen and read simultaneously? Listen and read and jot notes. Even better, imagine a gamification scenario where audio and visual content can be accessed to run simultaneously during immersive gameplay. OOH. I need to go think about that.

FWIW, when I do occasionally try reading simultaneously with both my eyes and ears I find that a bit confusing and actually slows me down. I think this is because with the ebook reader I use (MoonReader) the content being read is not 100% in sync with the TTS engine. It just highlights the current paragraph so what you're reading and listening to is always a bit out of sync.

It would be interesting if there was an app that let you practicing reading with two inputs at the same time. I'd try that. On the other hand, then you do really need to dedicate 100% of your attention to material being read, which I usually don't have time for.

Voice Dream Reader 4.0 on iOS added a "pac man mode" which is designed for combined visual+audio input. The visible words disappear (pac-man style) a fraction of a second before the TTS engine reads them, forcing your eyes to stay slightly ahead of your ears. Apparently this is based on some reasearch into dyslexia and is supposed to improve comprehension at high speeds.

Voice Dream Reader is also available on Android, but I'm not sure if it's been updated with the pac-man mode feature or not.

I haven't tried it yet but from what I've read online Voice Dream Reader looks really sweet. I love that it's laser focused on the exact use case I've been promoting here. I was particularly impressed by this blog post on their site showing how a particular dyslexic reader is using Voice Reader to read at 650 WPM:

Always fun to debate with you. You're very clever and very ernest. On this topic, though, I will continue to wave the counter-point flag...if for no other reason than for the fun of it :-)

Your response is an interestingly defensive reaction. I had hoped for a more substantive counter. You are usually more thoughful. In this case your responses did not appear to actually seriously consider that the turbo TTS approach may have some flaws. You seem to be unnaturally quick to reject a contrary view on a topic you are clearly "sold"on (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotoma ).

Let me review your response:

1) You equate speed reading with skipping content and label it "cheating". Isn't the point of the exercise to extract the maximum value in the shortest time? You can speed up audible playback of "is', "was", "has", "is", "the", and a million other filler words to your heart's content but I'll still get more out of a document faster than you by "skipping" all those words. You also failed to recognise the brain's ability to yield value through contextual adjacency of visual material. Have a read through some of the PhD papers on voice and speech recognition and you will realise just how much we comprehend through context. When you listen to a document your brain receives the information serially. When you read it your visual system includes other spacial cues in reaching conclusions. The brain's visual ability to interpolate information between adjacent information is the basis for interlaced television. The brain's inability to comprehend and retain long numeric strings audibly is why a phone number is broken into sub strings (http://www.youramazingbrain.org/yourmemory/digitspan.htm ).

2) You did not appear to have a look at the links I provided which included a more detailed description of speed reading as more than "skipping content" and a link to speed reading software exactly as you hypothesised in your response as being potentially useful if it existed! I can only assume that you TTS'd the forum response and the links got dropped :-) By the way, in a turbo TTS session how does the audio playback handle embedded article link traversal! I know if speed reading a compelling link I will follow it and speed-read the referenced content. In a turbo TTS playback are the links read out loud (yawn) or dropped (ouch).

3) You chose not to respond to my observation that doing multiple things at the same time is not additive. Doing two tasks simultaneously detracts from both. I doubt you will find many olympic weight lifters listening to a speeded up audio playback of Tolstoy's War & Peace while training for the olympics and then writing an under-grad thesis on the impact of a Napoleonic era on Tsarist society!

I'll give you audio playback while jogging on the treadmill...but that's as far as I'll go :-)

You're right. The website sends me notifications of comments. I was
speed reading (visually) through them and then speed writing a response
from my email client, where the links don't work. So I haven't taken a
look at your links yet and speed writing reduces my usual
thoughtfulness. It's a trade off. You caught me! I have flagged your
links to read later in Pocket though.

Maybe I did come off as a bit more defensive than I meant. Committing to
anything in public makes it harder to see a balanced point of view,
though I still try. To be fair I think I still do the bulk of my reading
visually since that's my main mode of interaction with the computer and
for doing research.

The part that's really exciting isn't using this as a substitute for
visual reading but as a supplement. I was quite the book worm as a kid
but at some point I had to give that up due to lack of time. My
dedicated book reading dropped way way down. I still read and wrote a
lot thanks to my computer use but that wasn't the same as sitting down
with a good book. With this technique I now have at least a couple of
hours every day (more on the weekend when I workout) where I can do some
genuine reading. I'm rereading Lord of the Rings now on my meal breaks.

Regarding point 2 - "slowly reading documents you want to enjoy" I'd
like to stress that once you brain adapts even the fastest speed
supported by today's TTS engines doesn't feel uncomfortable, or maniacally
fast. It's counterintuitive at first but once you get used to it it doesn't
feel like you are holding on for your life. It's enjoyable. The words
just pop into your head. Stretching a bit beyond that speed is a bit
uncomfortable though but that's only until you adjust. Just hang in
there. I admit if I actually try to listen to the sound (rather than the
meaning) buzzing out of my earphone it can sound a bit like a fax
transmission.

Regarding where speed audio listening is most useful, the treadmill is
actually an additional challenge for me because I push myself pretty
hard and the mental effort required to sustain that competes with the
mental effort of listening. So I still take it down a notch. All my
other "effortless" routines don't require me to do that. FWIW, exerting
effort / will power does require the prefrontal cortex to get involved
so perhaps that's the reason. It has gradually gotten easier though. I
think when you train your brain like this you build mental reserves.

Note that once you reach the top speed using this technique is a much
more practical way to regularly reread the same texts as often as you'd
like. This past week I've been revisiting books I haven't read a while
and I've gotten through the Power of habit, Jurrasic Park, The Selfish
Gene, and 2001 Space Odyssey. I had some errands yesterday and 2001 was
a mid-day adventure. I think it took about as long as watching the movie.

I'm trying to give this idea a fair go but you're still evangelising and not putting meat on the bone. The only time I could even imagine using this technique would be on the treadmill but you have just confessed that you can't do it on the tradmill because it impacts your concentration! I certainly wouldn't want to be trying this out while chopping up the onions for dinner (ouch)! Help me out here.

So when DO you use this technique if not on the treadmill, chopping onions, or driving to work. Not sure what's left.

Regarding using turbo TTS for a good book read for enjoyment you can count me out. It would be like chugging a fine glass of wine. You can do it but why would you :-)

I leave you with a link in line with the theme of this post...30 second versions of most blockbuster movies...done with animated bunnies, of course. The creators of the website observed that all blockbuster movies are sold on the basis of a 30 second treatise...so why not just make a 30 second movie!

For those with loftier tastes I leave you with a link to a site dedicated to stories that are exactly six words long (inspired by an Ernest Hemingway challenge in a bar after too much to drink...he did win the bet though).

Sorry you misunderstood me I actually do use this on the treadmill. I
just lower the speech rate by about 20%. That speed is fine for me
because I've gotten used to even higher speeds but it's still much too
fast if you aren't used to it.

Like the article mentions, I also use this with any activity that
doesn't require a lot of thoughfulness: preparing and eating meals,
doing my laundry, cleaning, going to the post office, commuting, etc.
When the amount of cognitive effort of the other activity I am
performing in parallel varies I will prefer to use the bluetooth headset
with media controls so I can stop and start playback without having to
fumble for my phone.I

Regarding the strain and enjoyment here's an analogy of how I've found
this to work. If you're used to lifting weights and you go into the gym
after a long day of work you may decide to exercise a bit less
intensely. But your performance is still much higher than someone who
doesn't train at all because you've built reserves. Then you go to the
supermarket and you have to lift a few bags and because you've built up
more strength those bags don't seem as heavy as they used to.

I am evangelizing passionately for greater wider use of this technology
because I've personally found it so incredibly useful that I can't
believe not everyone is using this. I feel like the person that
discovers that lifting weights on a high protein diet builds physical
strength in a world where nobody seems to have realized that.

I can understand why you wouldn't want to read some books using this
method if you are only reading for enjoyment. But if you do gradually
ramp up the speed then you'll find that cognitive strain disappears
entirely. For extra enjoyment on that special text you can then ramp
down the speed so instead of a run it feels more like a stroll. After
ramping up the speed in which you can run, the speed at which you will
be comfortable strolling will be much higher than when you began. In
that sense it's not a perfect analogy because running doesn't actually
improve how fast you can comfortably walk. But training your brain like
I suggest actually does do that.

You just have to chuck out your preconceived notions of what it will
feel like to be reading at that speed a year or two down the road. It's
kind of hard to imagine perception changing but I assure you it does.

Anyhow, this might not be for everyone. To each his own I guess. But I
do recommend you try it.

I've been doing this just as a form of entertainment while driving and in transit. I have always had real problems with noisy envionments, so it is really good to hear that this activity constitutes something like a therapy.

Is anyone else astonished at the apparent lack of pure voice controls for web navigation?

I worked with the application of voice recognition with leading voice recognition teams at Nortel labs and Telstra labs over the years and voice recognition is harder than it looks.

Without 100% success rate with all voice types and accents a voice recognition interface does not gain acceptance by consumers. What do you do if the software can't recognise you! You can use the mouse / keyboard as backup but now you have two interfaces to support and an audience untrained in the non-voice interface.

To achieve 100% success under these circumstances requires a limited vocuabulary within a pre-defined context. Usually "Yes", "No", "City Name", for taxi-centric voice recgnition as an example.

Web browsing is a generic exercise so you would need an unlimited vocabulary which is possible,but not with 100% accuracy.

As an example, I have voice recognition on my Samsung S4. If I yell at it in the car loud enough in handsfree mode it will recognise my desire to call a friend after a few attempts but in some cases only after I mispronounce the friend's name in a fashion that the computer understands. I have two friend's with similar names pronounced differently. When pronounced correctly the computer hears only one of the two names even though the pronunciation is different. I have to mispronounce one name to get it recognised. To figure out the correct mis-pronuncuation for success required hit & miss experimentation.

Even really good voice recognition like Nuance's Dragon Naturally
speaking. There's a light version of that for the phone called Swype
which I use but it doesn't support the full range of commands which
makes the inevitable mistakes much harder to deal with. If it
misidentifies text you can't go back and delete that like you can with
the PC version of the software.

So I've found dictation to be only useful if I speak clearly and refrain
from using "uncommen" words. So in effect instead of the dictation
software adapting to me I have to adapt to it.

Unfortunately, highly accurate speech recognition is difficult even for
humans and requires something resembling higher order cognition to
filter out unlikely combinations. In other words, this will get better
but it won't get as good as human voice recognition until software can
actually comprehend meaning.. There is too much ambiguity in speech for
the statistical models to work very well. You just don't notice it
because your brain usually filters that out.

Incidentally gradually ramping up the speech rate of your text to speech
engine forces your brain's voice recognition function to speed up, and
since that depends on higher order cognition, that too.

>To achieve 100% success under these circumstances requires a limited vocuabulary within a pre-defined context.

I think internet browsing for something to read/listen-to can be approached as one well suited to such a scenario. The only delecate point is the search term, which can be confirmed with a "yes" or "no" and repeated as many times as it takes, or until the user usues another search term.

How might this look in practive. You can imagine many ways. Here's one off the top of my head:

User activates system with predefined activation term.

User speeks the designated term to initiate an internet search

System prompts user for search term.

User speeks search term.

System reads back encoded search term.

If user does not confirm go to 3, else user confirms go to 7

User is prompted to indicate preferred result by speaking a predefined preference indication term ("click"?) during or immediately follwing the reading of a result.

System begins reading results

User indicates preffered result

System confirms

If user confirms then go to 12, else read the result immediately preceeding and go to 11.

system loads url current (last read) link

system reads links and text until user speaks predefined prefrence indication term ("click"?); go to 14. Links can be read in a special tone. If user speaks no term, system will continue reading until all content has been read.

System confirms by reading current (last read) link text. If user confirms go to 11 else system reads link immediately preceeding current link. If user still does not confirm system reads link immediately after current link. At any time user can speek predefined term to start-over, reverse direction, speed up, slow sown.

I really like the idea of hands free, eye free web surfing. I think this
could be super useful especially once you get used to using text to
speech instead of a screen.

The closest I can get to this right now is pressing the button on my
Bluetooth headset to invoke Google Now and asking it really basic
questions like what's the time or what is the weather is going to be
like today. So far I've only done that if I wake up in the middle of the
night and don't want to disturb my circadian rhythm by exposing my eyes
to an lcd.

I love audio interfaces. As soon as they work better I think they'd be
useful in many situations. Not just driving, which might be a tad
dangerous if you have to do too much interacting, but also for the
handicapped/disabled. For healthy folks this would make for a great on
the go interface that doesn't require you to have anything more than an
earphone on your head. It would also work better under low power
conditions because screens use a tremendous amount of power, radiating
light the way they do in all directions.

Regarding the implementation specifics you proposed, it sounds like a
good start for a UX design. Once we actually give this a go more details
will become evident and we can refine and optimize.

Keeping my mind from wandering into alternate universes while driving is already a losing task. This is of course to say nothing of the impossibility of focussing on the road when it counts most; while driving through a place like Hollywood, where distracting drivers is a multi-billion dollar industry, and where many people are all to happy to distract drivers for free by the way they dress (or fail to dress). Besibes those distractions, honestly, nothing gets me into more danger than my own rage. This is a major problem in places like Los Angeles, where there really has not been anything like an alternative since mass transit was dismantled last century, so people who have no business driving have no choice but to drive anyway. Hopefully self-driving cars will come soon (as a side note; it occurs to me that self-driving cars may not even need to stop at intersections if their paths and dimensions are all integrated and calculated in real time).

If vocal navigating through chomsky.info can calm me down, I'll probably mitigate some of the life-shortening stress I'm under, and some lives might even be spared :)

But yeah, for now, I'll just keep taking the last few minutes at work looking for a nice long un-paginated article, or a speech ir debate on youtube.

If you're looking for lots of high quality, free reading material check
out 18-19th century literature. Some of the victorian-era stuff that is
still famous from that time is really good and still surprisingly
relevant. Times have changed but human nature has not. Dumas, Hugo,
Doystovsky, Tolstoy, Conan Doyle. I occasionally enjoyed going back even
farther to English translations of Latin/greek texts like "The
histories".

One of the many reasons I'm excited about this is I get bored easily and
when I get bored or otherwise understimulated I get stressed out and
start fabricating alternate universes on the go. So somewhat
paradoxically listening to a good yarn at a stimulating speed actually
helps calms me down during activities which are not in of themselves
very interesting. It's kind of like a cyber-Ritalin in that way.

I don't drive through Hollywood though. If I did, I'd probably want to
pay attention. At least until I got used to it.

I'd like better voice control for everything on my phone. On the other
hand please keep in mind that your safety may suffer if you interact
with your phone while driving, even if you only do it by voice, the same
way driving safety suffers if you talk to people in the backseat. It's
somewhat equivalent to driving drunk.

I noticed the same effect after speeding up speech rate in Google maps for driving directions because there where times that voice navigation wasn't providing enough lead time for a turn signal.
I noticed distraction from driving from voice nav was reduced, so I speeded it up to max to get the most benefit.
Voice Nav Was hard to understand at first, but got easier quickly like learning new vocabulary for concepts you already know.
From my perspective, what drove it all home and supports your theories was firing up voice nav as a passenger where the driver asked me how I could possibly understand what nav was saying when it seemed as clear as a normal speech rates to me.
I listened to a few books at that rate and found I could understand them as well at that speed and it's how I quickly ingest technical information while doing other things now.
I never even considered using it for personal stuff, have not read a book just for pleasure in a long time, but after reading your post, I will.
The one downside I have encountered, it's getting harder to stay engaged in conversations with people that talk slow or use big pauses in their speech patterns.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and insight.

Thanks for coming forward and taking the trouble to share your
experience which seems to corroborate some aspects of mine.

I've actually found it a bit harder to use this technique to ingest
technical information. Maybe I'm just not trying hard enough, or are too
used to doing this via my computer screen. I've subscribed to Hacker
Monthly and downloaded all of the issues of ePub so I think I'll give
that a try though.

You should really try this for pleasure. My reading is an eclectic mix
of interests, some related to work but mostly I use this to read books I
would otherwise read for pleasure (e.g., self education and entertainment).

I haven't become impatient (yet) with slow speakers myself, which is
kind of funny because I am very impatient with the slow text to speech
rate of Pocket. But that might have something to do with people in (my)
real life not speaking to me in English, but in Hebrew. Maybe if I moved
to an English speaking country I would get infuriated more often. "Speak
faster my good man, I don't have all day!"

If you are having trouble making your phone understand you, use the raw Google Voice Search along with an app like "utter!" that allows you to make full use of Google's servers with your phone. Because they are using a learning neural network, assuming you have enough bandwidth (full bars 3G or half of max bars 4G/LTE) and low latency, I've had complete conversations with a person only using my phone with very few typos, and the beauty of it all is that due to the very things you both have mentioned about the human brain auto correcting small mistakes, many of my friends never realize that on my end at least, I'm having a "normal" conversation.

There are also apps like Tasker and AutoVoice that allow you to use your phone's recognition to control elements of your house (or being listening to specific audio books or resume where you left off on the last one).

Thanks for suggesting I take a look at utter. I'm going to try that and see how it compares with Swype's voice recognition, which is what I'm currently using. Swype is a Nuance product and Nuance is well known for the clever use of AI software. I'm pretty sure that Dragon's dictation engine uses learning neural networks in part. It works offline which is nice but since it doesn't truly understand what I'm saying it can't get as good as a person. You have to anticipate meaning to do that.

FWIW, maybe I have unusually eclectic interests but my experience with Google Voice search, which does use Google's servers hasn't really been all that great when I stray off the well beaten path. I've noticed it's very good at recognizing what I want when my interests lie within the safe confines of popular culture though. Questions about the US president in particular always seem to work.

I think it was in a Ted talk (which I sadly cannot find) that I first encountered this idea. It was a video about designing web sites so that they're usable through a text-to-speech reader a blind person would use.

After letting the TTS read a web page, the speaker made a remark:
"Of course, that would be an excruciatingly slow speed for a blind person", or something to that effect, and played back the same TTS at 10 times the speed if I recall corectly.
So I'm guessing that there are people out there that do what you suggest and not even considering it a hack, but just normal reading ;)

Myself, I do something similar, though a lot less drastic. I sometimes use a piece of software I know from my musican days, called Amazing Slow Downer that can change the speed of audio without changing its pitch. VLC also can do this quite nicely, but I don't know of any Smartphone apps that could be helpful.
I use it to speed up audiobooks and podcasts. And it also helped me through a coursera class where the tutor was a bit of a slow speaker. I use only about a 1.5 speedup ratio, which is not much considering your suggestion, but you get a real person's intonation and stresses and all that instead of the TTS drone voice.

Totaly unrelated PS:
Firefox for some reason doesn't consider this comment box text, so I couldn't use the spelling checker. Sorry for any mistakes ;)

I saw the same TED talk and it stuck with me since the full speed he
played sounded a lot faster than the maximum speech rate supported by my
phone, which bummed me out a bit beacuse I don't think you need to be
blind to get used to that speed. You just need a lot of practice, which
I am willing to put in. Last week I finished rereading Lord of the Rings
in a bit less than the time it would have taken me to watch the movies.

Previously I had read it visually a decade or so ago during my military
service and I remember it took me at least a few weeks to get through so
that was several orders of magnitude faster and I enjoyed it more. The
long walks and descriptions of nature aren't as boring when they go by
more quickly!

Regarding the intonation, I know there is a pitch issue with some of the
text to speech engines but I haven't noticed that with the Inona voice
I'm using. It didn't sound like that when I started out but it actually
sounds almost normal to me now.

First off, thanks very much for this post! You succeeded in whetting my appetite and I've switched from listening to recorded audiobooks to using TTS with my calibre library. I'm also working on increasing the speed. Even after a few weeks I feel like I have a new superpower and I'm blasting through my back reading list and re-reading books that I always planned to re-read but would never have gotten around to otherwise.

A few notes on my own tools setup:

I'm using MPow FreeGo bluetooth earphone, which is cheap, small, and relatively discreet, and which has a media play / pause button. When it works well, it's perfect. My setup is a bit flaky though, which is frustrating; I blame the custom android build ("ROM") I'm running on my phone. One problem I had: I couldn't get the play / pause button to work in Moon+ reader, so I'm using FBReader instead, with the FBReader TTS+ Plugin from Hyperionics. The pause button on my headset works with this setup, sometimes. The other problem is that sometimes the audio doesn't want to go through bluetooth. I'll try switching to a stock "ROM" and see if that helps. But I like the form factor and the price of the MPow FreeGo.

As far as Pocket content goes, the @Voice Aloud Reader syncs with Pocket and has a nice reading list feature, where you can queue up a whole bunch of articles to read one after another.

I have yet to find a good mobile web browser TTS solution. I guess using Pocket as the intermediary works well enough for that though.

You're welcome! I'm really enjoying my new reading superpowers. The only
snag is that I tend to exhaust reading material that interests me pretty
quickly and that the more you read the more discriminating your reading
tastes tend to get. I just imported a big batch of new out of copyright
reading material that looked interesting into my reading list. There's a
lot of surprisingly good english literature from before the 20th
century. I recommend practicing on that.

Also, many thanks for the tips. I've been looking everywhere for a
Bluetooth earphone with a media pause/play button. I just ordered one
online and will report back whether I manage to get this to work with
Moon Reader. I'm using a stock Nexus 5. Haven't even bothered to root
it. If it doesn't work on that, that's something the Moon Reader
developer should be able to fix. Especially given that it works in
FBReader.

FWIw, all the mpow bluetooth earphones have media control built in. I have a collection of them in both single ear and double ear versions. The MPOW shield is my favorite single ear device, and the MPOW Swift is my favorite double ear device (e.g., noisy environments like the gym).

Thanks for the equipment update. I'll take a look at those new MPOW models next time I need a new headset. For myself, I have switched to a Plantronics BackBeat Fit, a double ear device. This device (at least on iOS) is much faster to connect and more reliable than the MPOW FreeGo was, so my reliability frustration has been solved. It has a few different buttons. I use the volume controls and play/pause. I sometimes also rewind using press-and-hold on the play button. I'm pretty happy with this setup.

I still have a few Plantronics earpieces laying around. They had amazing battery life. Much better than the Mpow earpieces.

I've tried two versions of Mpow's "Sweatproof" sports headphones, "Mpow Swift" and "Mpow Cheetah". BackBeat seems to be more like the Cheetah, except it has better battery life and is 4 times more expensive on Amazon ($75 vs $19).

The Cheetah devices also supports rewinding (long press volume down). I prefer the Swift though because it seems to have better noise cancellation which is useful when I'm at my noisy gym. What I don't like about the Swift is that it doesn't stay on very well if it's not plugged into both ears. Cheetah has a more rigid, coiled interconnection.

Interesting idea. I'm afraid if we did that we'd get more quantity of
speech without necessarily getting more quality of speech.

I think you can speed up thought somewhat but most people would benefit
from thinking more and saying less. At least until we figure out how to
speed up rational thought dramatically. Which would be interesting
because you'd probably also end up speeding up consciousness itself.

I get that effect sometimes when I meditate. Focus hard enough on the
present and time seems to stretch out.

I do this extensively for podcasts using the Presto application on Android. It replace the audio libs and allows the actual playback application to crank up the speed. Listening to 2.0x is comfortable now.

I'll definitely try the Text to speech technique for books. I always assumed fiction would feel weird at high speed.

One thing I try to be cautious of, is to allow for some period of personal thinking, for idea incubation. When consuming information at high speed the mind is focused and it doesn't leave much space for thinking and developping ideas, which is a second activity I like to do during the commute.

I don't think that high-speed reading with TTS is fundamentally
different than reading visually in respect to whether or not you can
reflect at the same time. You can't read and reflect simultaneously
either way. You can pause and reflect of course, or reflect afterwards
and you can do that whether you are reading with your eyes or reading
with your ears.

Fiction is not a problem at all once you get used to it. I just finished
reading Neil Gaiman's collection of short stories (Fragile Things) at
the top speed and I didn't feel like I had any trouble keeping up or
enjoying it. It's like there's a movie in your head.

I checked and even at the highest narration speeds the pace at which the
plot develops in real-time for fiction is roughly equivalent to the pace
of a television program. In other words the book version of a 2 hour
movie takes about 2 hours or so to read. Once you get used to the speed
of the voice you don't really notice it that much. In your head it plays
out at about the same speed.

The latest versions of MoonReader seem to max out at about 550 WPM, (speed 50). That's a bit faster than the maximum speed (40) when I wrote the blog post a couple of years ago.

FWIW, it took me a few months to adjust to the new speed, but if you don't continue regular practice the speed at which you're comfortable reading quickly decays and you have to start over at a lower speed.

Case in point, a three week period in which I laser focused on a work project to the exclusion of everything else was enough to require me to lower my reading speed by about 20%.

On the side, i wanna thank you for putting that much effort into this post.
Just what i was looking for at the time .
I started TTS- reading earlier this year (a few months before this post found me)

I was beginning to think i was crazy coz i couldnt find anyone around doing it.
when i first read your post i couldnt actually believe that you coud read at that rate (highest on moonreader)
I can gladly tell you that i too do the new highest level now on the google tts engine (depending on the complexity of the material).But my base speed is around the 34-36 level (without pauses in between sentences/passages).

So, thank you again for spear-heading this movement.

NB 1: I starting TTS-reading becuase I failed at learning Speed Reading (Visual reading).
NB 2: I strongly suggest you try the google tts engine as it goes even faster than Ivona (even at the same levels e.g 30 , 32, etc) or the other engines. I think its clearer (especially at such high speed) .overall,Sounds a little Robotic , but am sure that isnt an issue for a veteran like you..hahaha

On the side, i wanna thank you for putting that much effort into this post.
Just what i was looking for at the time .
I started TTS- reading earlier this year (a few months before this post found me)

I was beginning to think i was crazy coz i couldnt find anyone around doing it.
when i first read your post i couldnt actually believe that you coud read at that rate (highest on moonreader)
I can gladly tell you that i too do the new highest level now on the google tts engine (depending on the complexity of the material).But my base speed is around the 34-36 level (without pauses in between sentences/passages).

So, thank you again for spear-heading this movement.

NB 1: I starting TTS-reading becuase I failed at learning Speed Reading (Visual reading).
NB 2: I strongly suggest you try the google tts engine as it goes even faster than Ivona (even at the same levels e.g 30 , 32, etc) or the other engines. I think its clearer (especially at such high speed) .overall,Sounds a little Robotic , but am sure that isnt an issue for a veteran like you..hahaha

I started using Voice Dream plus the Amy UK voice on iOS (phone) as well as the Moon Reader plus Amy UK voice on my original nexus 7 tablet for almost a month. The two OSs seem to have different scales or different rates for the same number of WPM (110-700 ios vs speeds you see with moon reader). Using the iOS setup I have went from the base 180 WPM to 235 WPM cutting hours from the book I listen to. I am on book 10 so far this month which is an increase from 2-4 books a month I usually read. I use the nexus setup to listen to at night before bed while the phone is charging and I am listening to a different book. I started off the first book on one I had read recently and follwed along to get my brain trained to the voice. I was able to bump the speed up to 200 WPM quickly during the first book and have been increasing it a little at a time each time I finish a book or two at that speed. I can still sight read ahead of the speed but when sight reading I don't usually keep up that pace for long periods of time nor can I do other things while listening. I ended up taking a long road trip about 10 hours each way and listened while on the interstate/highways. I didn't have any problems with doing this and listening kept my brain engaged the whole time. I felt more alert and awake than I would have been if listening to music. Normally on these type of trips I would get audio books from the public library but this is much better. The selection is virtually limitless and the cost is much more affordable.

Over the last month I have introduced this concept to several "tech" folks most of whom have started using it in one way or another. I was also able to introduce it to some nurses at a hosptial while visiting a family member. They also were interested as it would provide them listen/read long emails/papers/ etc while doing some of the more menial tasks. As some of these folks had to sit in patient rooms "just in case" they can listen to this instead of music or watching the tv in the room.

Overall I am happy with my results so far and hope to continue the speed increase. I am retaining most if not all of what I am listening to and able to get more things done. The hardest thing I have tried to do while listening is reading something else . I have at times managed it but it is difficult to do.

I also wanted to read my email with txt2speech, so I created a script for converting maildir formatted folders into an epub I could load up on my phone to read a batch of emails. You kind of need to be a Unix geek to use this though. Most people don't store their mail locally in the maildir format.

I find your post intriguing... I'm starting to work towards a batch of Microsoft qualifications and they need a lot of reading.

You said technical stuff was harder to ingest, which is a shame. How much harder? Do you actually not bother with technical books?

Technical writing is more likely to be broken up with diagrams, paragraphs, footnotes etc. and without those you lose the physical structure of the text, which means you lose some of the clues and cues of how it all hangs together.

That recording is ultra-fast, probably 4x to 6x the standard elocution rate. To grasp this on first hearing you have to train for years.

I think it's not clear for researchers whether non-blind people can ever reach these speeds. Blind people do it constantly as they have no choice, so their level of training is unparalleled in the non-blind world. Also, they have superior focus abilities, assumedly recycling the large areas of the brain used for vision.

If you listen to it a few times you will start to catch words and then sentences.

You can reach 2.5x to 3x with training though. Which is also partly uncomprehensible for people that have never experienced it.

Your hypothesis regarding repurposing of brain regions normally used for visual processing for even faster speed reading is interesting. I know there is some evidence to support that this sort of neural compensation does happen for other abilities.

Regarding practice, there probably is a correlation between how much you practice and how fast you can go. Also, I suspect beyond a point you'll start to see diminishing returns no matter how much you practice. Perhaps that point of diminishing returns varies from person to person and depending on whether you're blind or not.

On the other hand, the maximum speed MoonReader supports has only increased by about 20% since I wrote the original post, so I haven't had a chance to reach my personal limits. So far it's been my experience that any significant speed increase is uncomfortable at first. If you go beyond that you lose concentration and the motivation to continue practising. But if you stretch your limits by just the right amount you do get used to it eventually and can continue ramping up gradually until you hit the maximum speed. Maybe beyond a certain speed this is no longer true. Or the amount of practice necessary to ramp up / maintain reading also increases. I suspect it might but that hasn't been something I've yet verified for myself.

I still use MoonReader it doesn't go that fast so I haven't found out if I can adjust to anything close to the speed of the screen reader in the audio you linked to. I can't make anything out in that audio either, but I can imagine adjusting to it after several years of gradual practice.

I've been trying to figure out what the deal is with Zersiax's screen reader audio recording. I've been practicing for a few months, and gotten my listening speed up to 600-700wpm as reported by VoiceDream Reader on iOS (with Ivona / Amy), and was previously 80% of the way to the top of the scale on Moon+ Reader and FBReader on Android, also with Ivona / Amy. Even with this new speed listening skill, that recording of Zersiax's screen reader (linked by Matthew) was almost completely unintelligible to me.

So at first I assumed with his years of practice, and with desktop software, Zersiax had the speed cranked up way higher than my phone and my ears can go. But in the hacker news commentary, and also in an IRC chat log, Zersiax (the blind programmer who wrote that article) estimates the speed is 525wpm or so—within the range that I've been practicing at.

My current theory is that the screen reader he is using (NVDA) uses voices that are optimized for latency, not throughput. The high quality Ivona voices recommended by Liraz take up a lot of space on disk, and I think it's because they have lots of hi-def audio samples that are used in the speech synthesis. Perhaps the startup time of such a high quality voice is an impediment when you're selecting menus and buttons and operating a computer, and so screen readers use lower quality voices that can stay fully resident in memory and can start generating speech a lot sooner.

I tried to duplicate his setup to test it out. NVDA is Windows only, but the TTS engine espeak has a Mac OS X build, and I did manage to get somewhat similar sounding output from it. With that, and with the SoundCloud recording, by listening repeatedly while reading the article that is being read, I can start to hear the words, and that reinforces my theory: it sounds unintelligible partly because it's fast, but also partly because it's a lower-fidelity, lower latency TTS engine.

So yes, with a moderate amount of practice, I think you can learn to listen that fast—but it might not be as fast as you think it is, and unless you practice with that speech engine, you still might not be able to understand the Zersiax recording. =)

To Ofbebaba, I don't have an app suggestion, but I did try measuring the speed of Voice Dream Reader myself with a few different voices, and discovered that not all voices are the same. If you're using Ivona's Amy on Voice Dream Reader, that voice seems is significantly slower than its nominal speed. I can't find my notes at the moment, but I think it was slower by somewhere around 20%-30%. So if you're currently using Amy, you can get a little extra oomph by switching to another voice, for example Acapela Heather, the fastest voice I measured at slightly faster than nominal, or Acapela Will, which I like better than Heather and is close to nominal speed.

Has anyone put in a feature request for faster speeds to any of the app developers?

With the recent update you can go past 700 WPM with some voices Paul (neospeech) for example and different voices do read at different rates but for me acapela and neo speech seem choppy and not nearly as smooth as ivona. I can comfortably listen to Brian set at 700 but it's hard to understand Paul at any speed over 600. Paul is definitely faster than Brian but if I set them to about the same actual WPM brian is way easer to understand. It seams that ivona voices are only slower because they reflect punctuation more and actually pause at "." "," "?" And "!"

Not longer after writing the original post 2 years ago. He said MoonReader's maximum speed was actually a limitation of Android's TTS API. I haven't verified that myself though. He did bump it up last year from 40 to 50. Also I notice some apps such as VoiceAloud do seem to go even faster than MoonReader.

I'm visually handicapped person. So listeninng books fast speed rate is natural for me.I also use OI notepad and speek notes if I have found somethihing interesting. I wonder when consenrateing, can we really do multiple tasks. Other thing is secure things. If you listen materal on move for example in car. Is it really safe.

I have been using sped up tts for a long time. But I was taking it for granted. I have dyslexia.

I my tts reading speed is around 400 WPM

I increased the speed and was surprised to find I could understand 700 WPM

I use ivona Kendra and a free program called Balabolka. I use it to convert texts into audio files. I play them with an audio book player. In the most recent version Balabolka's creator added something called spritz-reader, its under tools. Spritz is a speed reading tool. There is a spritz website if you want to see it online. It works well but I can see some ways to improve it. I started thinking about speed reading and speed listening. (this is when I found this site)

I started thinking what if I made an improved spritz-like program paired with a text-to-speech voice that is optimized for speed. I call my idea spitz. It would speed up on common words, but slow down on technical words or oddly constructed sentences. It could also have the option to only voice non-common words, for super skimming. I could tell you more of my idea if you are interested.

I also speed up most videos to X2. I use powerdvd because it causes the least distortion, but VLC is almost as good.

Interesting idea to variate the speed depending on difficulty of the word!

I also watch sped up videos but usually never faster than 1.5x for fiction, otherwise I find that it gets very awkward with people motion. I use SMPlayer on Windows and remapped speed control to Up and Down arrow keys for convenience.

For every one reading this that is not yet aware, many YouTube videos now have a speed control under the settings button in each video, where you can speed up, up to 2x. Very cool feature.

I changed my mind about calling it spitz. It has grown and developed into something new. And I don't want to get sued by spritz.

This project has been on the back burner but within a month my schedule should become less hectic and I will dedicate some solid time to it.

I am not a professional programmer, but I have dabbled. Perhaps this could be a plugin for calibre.

There is an open source program called Ekho that could be relevant.

My goal is to create a free program with an emphasis on helping dyslexic and low vision people to study.

I am an animator so one of the first things I will do is experiment with different ways to animate the text. I may have time to make a more detailed description of what I am thinking within a week. Also I will look into crowd funding.

Thanks for sharing this great article. I have forced myself to try speed-reading over the past year, but progress was really slow and motivation lacking.

With the advice from your article, I am able to read text much much faster as I don't have to sound out the words in my head. The number one rule of speed reading is to not sound out the words in your head, which is completely counter intuitive. I always had a hard time to put this into practice, but now with the help of TTS going at a very high rate, I can read text much faster.

I would say that probably the best way to use TTS would be to read the text at the same time (specially technical books or Maths textbooks).

I thought I was the only one who was on the persuit for faster comprehension. You're definitely right though about not having much on Google this was all I could find. I actually found this post a few months ago, but only fully read it today. Any updates since this was posted?

I've read about 200 books in the last 2 years since I wrote that, so I'm averaging about 2 books per week, which is a bit less than I was averaging back then, which I attribute to a more active social life and a noisier gym.

MoonReader bumped up the maximum speed so I'm reading at 50 now, instead of 40. Occasionally fall off to a slower speed if I don't practice for too long.

And finally: using MPOW family of bluetooth headsets, which have built-in media control.

I was searching the web today to see if I could find some kind of app to control the text to speech function of Ivona with Kindle. I'd been using it at the fast setting, and was as you mention suprised at how much rentention I had listening to the book "The Spy's Son" Perhaps the speed increase that takes place is the audio equivalent of "skipping" the but's, and's etc's. I started a new book that I'm listening to for research. It had a glossery at the beginning, at the fast setting I wasn't catching all the terms. But when I slowed it down to normal it was agonizing! Thus my search and happily finding you :) I actually did download the free version of the Moon Reader, but I guess I was too impatient to take the time to look into it carefully. From your recommendation I will buy the Moon Reader Pro, simply to get more control over the speed between "Normal" which seems mentally deficient now, and "fast" which seems normal to me in most cases, except when there is something information-dense like a glossary. I will check out the voice you mentioned, though I have been satisfied using Ivona's "Kendra" except for the occasionial word, strangely pronounced

So congratulations and thank you for pioneering this possibility.

I have a brother who makes apps. What would it require to bring the speed up to ANC: "Absolute Neural Capacity?" :) I wonder.

Imagine that there would have to be special compression that would ensure a certain number of microseconds between words. But it is an exciting idea. Language developed long before writing did, so perhaps we are tapping into something that has much more robust evolutionary support. Of course one might add that sight developed before speech, but the adaptation that reading requires is I believe significant in terms of mental resources compared to listening. In either case thank you, you've made my day.

Hi Daniel, thanks for sharing. It's awesome to know the post is still inspiring new readers to give this a try.

Tell your brother that if he makes an app that helps me reach "Absolute Neural Capacity": he will have at least one very happy, very loud customer.

With regards to the flavour of voices being used, I'm not sure it matters all that much once your brain gets used to it. There does seem to be an adjustment period for any change, even the same voice using different a different bluetooth device. Last year I spent a couple of months cranking up the speed of audio lectures on various subjects using the "Smart AudioBook Player" android app and after a while I reached the maximum acceleration speed and it was good.

With the Kindle Reader I can turn off the screen and it keeps reading. I don't seem to be able to do that with

The Moon+ Reader have you found any way to do this? I can turn the screen brightness down to zero, and see that I can move away from sometimes from the app window itself and it will keep going. I'd like to be able to walk around with it without it stopping.

There's a wild story that I've heard: There is one theory that humans were genetically engineered by "The Gods" i.e. Aliens, to work as their slaves. In that process of engineering they purposely put a choke point that prevented full access to brain function. Which is why, according to the theory, we are only able to access 10% of our capasity. So I'm wondering if what we are doing is with the high speed listening is not somehow pushing past that. At some point it might give way. What would it be like to have full access?

Exploring that is, the idea behind the movie (and now tv series) Limitless.

Hi Daniel, I always voice read with the screen turned off and that's never been an issue. Not sure why you're having that problem.

Regarding the aliens, that is a good story. A modern twist on ancient creator myths I suppose. I just finished reading Children of Time, which has a similar plot, except with the humans as the (flawed) godlike creators of another sentient species.

You might be interested in reading the Wikipedia article on the ten percent of the brain myth. I can't guarantee it's not part of the alien conspiracy to keep us in our place though. :)

FWIW, I have a feeling we'll all be getting smarter if we live long enough and then we get to find out what's that's like. Hopefully we'll find wisdom to temper our new powers, otherwise it could get messy.

1. Proved I am not the only one who wishes for a usb port for the back of my head.

2. Increased my library (and wishlist).

3. Maybe the most unthinkable: converted me from an ios user!!!!!!

I had a "workflow" on linux/mac to take books/webpage/pdf and run them threw various scripts to output in a sterialized manner that the tts engine could understand. At one point I used apple script to convert text into an audio file which then was converted to a podcast so that itunes would play at double the speed. :)

copy text to clipboard then send to voice reader
nice navigation/ controls
reads at the spead/pitch voice set up in your tts settings
- Ivona voices

At some point I plan on putting a post togehter with my own spin on this topic. Long before discovering this article I have been known for disappearing for a bit and coming back with the phrase "I know kung fu". Now you have made this easier and faster.

I have had the same idea. It's the best thing that has popped into my head. lol. It's a great way to save hours if not months if not years of your life and at the same time enhances the quality of your life and makes you smarter. I have even gone as far as wondering if it's possible to even chop the audio down to essential information. Like when you speed read you skip certain words. I wish there was a software that would cut out certain words that are unnecessary for comprehension and therefore accelerate the speed listening technique even further and overtake speed reading... lol. I even wonder if your brain can get used to the speed until it's like an audio version of steno. So that one book takes 10 minutes or even 1 minute to download into your brain by sound. I mean, we can comprehend the world around us visually within seconds. Why shouldn't that also be possible by audio? Imagine a world full of smart people. That would certainly accelerate us into the future. I even apply this technique at work now and people wonder how I get things done so quickly. lol

I am very surprised. I didn't realized how many people are thinking the same solution at the same time.

I was working in construction and I decided it's time to change, so I've listed up two programming courses (4 different languages). Since I had a family at home and too many hours at work, I had no time to study. This is how I've came up with the idea of converting my PDF books into MP3 (with TTS) and pass them onto my phone. I was working 10 hours/day listening to my courses. I've finished both with the higher grade possible.

So, my first intention as a programmer was to build some solutions for the problems I have stumbled upon while learning by audio:

Navigation and examples.

Navigation it's an easy fix if you use Moon+ Reader and similar. But my phone at that moment didn't supported it so I had to convert to Mp3.

As you can imagine, the examples in my books, the blocks of code, where text too, so the TTS engine converted those into sentences. It's imposible to understand it with all those { } ; , > = < [ ]. So as soon as I managed the Navigation system in the audio files (MP3, OGG, and so on), I was able to sync al kind of stuff to the track, so that all the images, graphics, PDFs, links and whatever will popup on the screen at the right moment.

So what we have now it's a platform that hosts (for free) audiobooks, podcasts and courses in audio format. One more feature we have added is the transcription service for all the spoken tracks that are uploaded to our platform. It's the reverse thing for the TTS. It takes out the text from a previous made audio track (or you can add it manualy if you have it).

My project it's called SMAB (SMart AudioBook) and you can find more info at www.smab.audio

In the next weeks will open the beta for testing and in september we will go for a crowdfunding campaign.

If you guys are interested to make part of the beta testers, please leave your email address on our landing page form. You'll get an invitation!

If I had a podcast (not a bad idea) I would definitely use this. FWIW, your site mentions support for free content. I would put all of that front and center so you don't even need to sign up to access it.

I've been doing this for *years*. It's so cool to find someone else who uses this technique!

One problems I've had, though, is that every TTS app for android sucks for my purposes. Specifically, when TTSing I make frequent use of my bluetooth headset forward/rewind buttons, and therein lies the problem.

I'm thinking of doing a larger writeup, but:

1. FBReader TTS loses track of my headset entirely.

2. MoonReader+ frequently responds to the back button by skipping an arbitrary amount of text, sometimes *in the wrong direction*.

I've run into the same problems with the forward/rewind button. Sometimes it would jump to the wrong place, other times the TTS engine would just stop working. I avoid using it now, but I wish it weren't so.

If I had to put one thing at the top of my wishlist for better TTS reading it would improved non-visual controls. I hate having to access my phone to go back when I miss something.

We use so many anti spam defenses on the site I'm sometimes surprised we don't have more problems with non-spam false positives. Regardless a little bit does seem to get through no matter what we do, and it sometimes takes a little bit of time until it's noticed and squashed.

I enjoyed your write-up about text to speech. I do something similar except use a program on my laptop called rapidreader which flashes one word on the screen at a time at a high rate of speed. I find that it is a unique reading experience - almost as if I am watching a movie.

Thanks for discovering this and writing about it. I noticed this effect in myself over the last 6 months or so after habitually ramping up my TTS speed to around 3.2x over the last two or three years. I have been using the @voice app on android to read me books while doing my walks - so exercising and listening were always combined. I started to notice recently that my reading ability had somehow improved and where I originally felt that somehow I was "pushing" the words into my mind the process now seemed more like they were effortlessly "sliding in". Also I found that my typing speed had increased and typing even became more effortless.

I would agree that your description of this being "intelligence amplification" isn't far off the mark. I guess from my experience I would describe it as "clearing out blockages" in the communications channels of the brain so that the flow is faster. I had never heard of this effect before and it even took me a while to attribute it to the TTS speed - initially I thought it was caused by something else. The improvement came "way out of the blue".

I'm not so attracted to the analogy that I am plugging into my virtual USB(rain) socket. Now that I have finally found other people that also have experienced these benefits I am thinking more along the lines of brain training for things like Alzheimer's. There's been a lot of talk about brain training to build up against dementia but I think this effect is one that also helps in heaps of ways in the here and now not just for some potential future advantage - which it might also help with too.

Do you know of any research that has been done about this effect? I know I can search for it myself too but I think it is good to ask here too.

I have read this article some time a go, but I had trouble to set up in a titan phone, since myself don't fit in as a Millennial type, in manner things are slow over here. Now, there is no IVONA tts any longer? Unfortunately recent comments stops at fresh 2017s with a void about such move of resources (resumed to Polly, I assume). For quick turn up, what current tts plugin are you using? Thanks again mr. Liraz and all like-minded folks.